things culinary were going, a young Hungarian servant had been sent him
by one of his sisters. She was an excellent cook and had taught Anna in
a way, a lot of things, but she had been landed, like all good cooks,
in the net of marriage, and was succeeded in the Birbach household by
various maids of varying and inferior talents. But Anna really didn't
know good food from bad, and she got careless too. Pauli was oftener
and longer absent, and then the War came and then the Peace. Pauli by
no means let them starve, but he didn't see his way to keeping those
two ghosts, who unnaturally bore his name, supplied with the delicacies
or, to be more exact, the relative delicacies of post-war Vienna, that
oftener than not they would spoil in the cooking.
He had his two sisters, widowed on the same day of the war, and their
broods of little children to support. It had not been so difficult
to care for them at first for they had taken their children and gone
back to the house of their mother near Groswardein, that comfortable
Landhaus that they had all three inherited with its acres bearing wine
and grain. But when they thought the war was over they suddenly found
themselves one dark night fleeing with the rest of the inhabitants
before an unexpected army. After days they got into Budapest and when
the panic had abated and they wanted to go back, they found to their
consternation that though they were still Hungarian their lands had
become Roumanian. Some dark, transmuting evil had been worked. Suddenly
they had no civil state there where they were born and no longer
possessed what their parents had bequeathed them ... as unbelievable as
that.... Pauli enabled them to eke out a reduced existence with their
many children in some rooms on the outskirts of Pesth.
The comfortable Landhaus with its pink walls, its green shutters, its
sloping roof, the grapevine growing up over the door, the great plane
tree in the garden, became as a lost paradise to be described to
children at the knee,--with hints of recovery when they were old enough
to fight for their own.
Though Anna suspected that Pauli supported his sisters and in her
heart was bitter about it, she had no courage and less opportunity to
reproach him with it.
Pauli loved his sisters very much, especially his sister Mimi, and
he had never told her the tale of Geza's death brought back by his
comrade. How they were to charge a certain hill in Galicia one chilly
autumn dawn in the face of the enemy, waiting millions of them, it
seemed, after the Russian way of lavish cannon-food. How Geza naturally
a laughing man had been leaden-hearted as they went up side by side;
even the schnapps served out to the troops had not put heart into him.
He had said, "I'm going up because I must, but it's quite useless--I'll
never come down again."... Geza loved life ... and when they got up to
the top immediately a great splinter of shell struck him in the chest
and he looked a last reproachful look at his comrade as he fell against
him.... The end of Geza who loved life.
No, Pauli couldn't bear to think of that. Some day he meant to tell
Mimi of those cruel last moments, when Geza knew, knew that his end was
near.
... Perhaps he never would, and then again the day might come when it
wouldn't hurt Mimi so much. The children would never understand. And
it would be as if Geza, heavy with premonition, had never charged that
hill and said those last words,--as if he had never been at all. That
was the way of life, but Pauli didn't like to think of it ... all that
being no more ... as if you had never been; his bright, strong flesh
rejected it.
He was, somewhat vaguely to his wife, in business that brought with
it frequent mention of the Travel Bureau in the Kaerntnerring and
entailed many absences. They had grown accustomed to his travels,
and anyway the thoughts of his wife and daughter ran, with that of
the rest of the population on what they were going to eat and how
they were going to get it, rather than on the coming or going of any
non-edible, even husband and father. So, though they were among the
relatively well-to-do in the starving city, the two women talked almost
entirely of what they had eaten or were going to eat and Hermine was to
experience her greatest enthusiasms when scurrying home with a bit of
fat or a can of jam.
* * * * *
The difficulty of getting to Anna's from the Hoher Markt was occupying
Frau Stacher's thoughts as she lay awake in the early dawn, watching
the day grow stronger, till she could see Haydn leading the young
Mozart by the hand, and the gilt of the flat, white vase on the bracket
underneath began to glisten faintly in the dull light coming in over
the top of the curtains.
The trolley that she could take at the Opernring was itself far off and
the fares had jumped up to prohibitive prices. Foreigners, workmen and
Jews alone had the wherewithal. She decided finally as she proceeded,
soundlessly as possible, to make the limited toilet the alcove
permitted, that she would walk. The hot cup of ersatz coffee with the
ersatz sugar and the thin slice of gritty bread seemed somehow quite
sufficient. She had entirely lost that wild hunger of the night before,
so curiously the result of the tasty meal at Liesel's. She made up her
divan, put her things in order and carefully pulled back the curtains
of the alcove. She had been made aware, the morning before, that Irma
liked to have them drawn back early and tight, and certainly it did
give a more spacious aspect to the living room, off which were the two
little bed chambers, one occupied by Irma with her youngest boy and the
other by Ferry and Gusl. Except for the fading photograph, on the chest
of drawers, of the long dead Commercial Advisor in its wooden frame of
carved Edelweiss, got when he and his bride had gone to Switzerland,
his widow was completely wiped out of that living space. She felt no
more at ease there than if she were suspended in mid-air, or pressed
into some shadowy yet too-narrow dimension,--in a word horribly
uncomfortable....
The boys had had their cocoa, their thick slices of bread so carefully
measured and cut, and had gone off to school. Heinie would get a midday
meal at a relief station near the seat of learning, which provided for
one scholar out of each needy family each day. The three boys took
turns, coming home for dinner on alternate days. There was a fierceness
about Irma where food for the boys was in question. When they had
licked their spoons and looked about at the empty plates on the table,
with their eyes a trifle too big, and Ferry with those bright spots on
each cheek, Irma's jaw would set and her brow darken. Not long before
she had discovered however, a way of adding to their nourishment ...
the "Friends" in the Singerstrasse ... you received a ticket there
and then you went to the Franzensplatz to get the package. But as the
endeavor of the various foreign relief societies was not to fully
nourish any one family or quarter at the expense of other families and
quarters, but to the best of their limited ability to keep as large a
part as possible of the two and one half millions from actually dying
of hunger, that relief in any one case was only palliative....
When Tante Ilde set out on that tramp to Anna's dressed again
in her best things,--Pauli always noticed what women wore, even
old women,--she left Irma planning the midday meal. Irma in an
extraordinarily fortunate way had got hold of some chicken legs,--it
would never happen again she was sure, being inclined to pessimism.
She had scraped and washed them, and was going to cook them with the
rice. Furthermore into the rice she was going to put a little of the
evaporated milk that had come in the thrice blessed package from the
Franzensplatz, it would be nearly equal to meat. Enough for three
plates full, two large ones for Gusl and for little Heinie and a
smaller one for herself. A box of zwieback had come in the package too,
and a piece for each would be dipped into some of the milk. It was a
good day and she warmly returned Tante Ilde's farewell and told her
she hoped Anna would have something fit to eat. She had a feeling that
she couldn't get rid of, that some day Tante Ilde would have a cold or
something and wouldn't be able to get out. However sufficient unto the
day, and that morning she was almost affectionate.
When Frau Stacher got down into the street a great puff of wind
caught her and slapped her dress about her legs, but she disentangled
herself and stepped, not unbriskly, into the Rotenthurm Street. The
day was cold and overcast, but the rain had not yet begun to fall.
She passed St. Stephen's, crossing herself as she did so and got into
the Kaerntner Street. In spite of the chill dampness and the great
slaps of wind doing full honor to the reputation of the windiest of
cities, (the Windobona of the Romans, that name on which generations of
windswept inhabitants have made their jokes and puns), she felt more at
home than in the alcove. After all the pavement was free to everybody,
just as much hers, when you came down to it, as anybody's. Quite unlike
the alcove which in some pervasive, though not at all indefinite way,
seemed not to be hers. She tried to comfort herself with the thought
that she was paying for it, just as Irma decently tried to remember
that fact. But Irma clearly wanted to be alone with her children.
Irma's nerves, for all her seeming bodily health, were certainly in a
bad way....
Passing down the Kaerntner Street Frau Stacher stood a moment looking
in at Zwieback's windows, such warm stuffs in such bright colors were
displayed, gay knitted Jerseys and scarves,--a purple one that would
have lain consolingly against her pale thinness. There were silk
stockings too, beribboned underwear and in another window incredible
evening dresses. Who on earth wore evening dresses--now? She remembered
how she had got her grey silk dress there for Kaethe's wedding. In the
old days she had shopped just like anybody else, buying things she
didn't need and would soon forget she had....
Then suddenly she found that her heart was beating thickly. She was
passing Fanny's corner, timidly looking away from it, magnetically
drawn to it; the pavement seemed somehow alive under her feet.... She
longed yet feared to meet Fanny; Fanny wrapped to her sea-blue eyes in
her scented furs, Fanny young and beautiful, Fanny who knew neither
cold nor hunger, nor about being unwanted. Fanny's desirability, though
it brought no images with it, sent the blood pounding up darkly to her
face....
But she was white again as she passed the Hotel Erzherzog Johann,
remembering with a sudden stab how she had always driven there in a
drosky when she came to Vienna from Baden for a day's shopping, and
how pleasant that great, laughing, singing city had seemed. Now the
iridescence had gone out of it. It was drab where once it had gleamed
with a thousand vivid tints; beggarly where it had dispensed with a
lavish unconcern.
She had been in the habit of taking her dinner at the Erzherzog
Johann's, the proprietor had been a friend of her husband's. The old
head waiter would always greet her warmly as a friend of the house
he had served so long, and he would recommend a quarter of a roast
chicken, the wing and breast, of course, and tell her how the noodles
had been made fresh in the hotel that very morning, and then wind up by
singing the merits of a Linzer or Sacher tart.
She'd leave her bundles there and come back at four o'clock for her
coffee with whipped cream, and he'd cut her a slice of the fresh
gugelhupf. Such happy days. She hadn't really had the slightest idea
how happy they were; she thought how she had often worried about the
stupidest things. She became conscious of an increasing sadness as
she passed on down the street, realizing miserably how little human
beings make of their actual blessings, whatever they may be, and
she found herself sending up a prayer to be trusted with a little
happiness,--just once more. She thought how never, never again, should
they miraculously be hers, would she take as rightful dues her three
meals a day, her comfortable bed, her clothes befitting the seasons,
but that always, up from her heart would well thanks to the mysterious
Giver or Withholder of these things.
She felt a little faint as she hurried past the delicatessen shop on
the corner. There wasn't much in the windows; food wasn't kept in
windows in those days, but inside there would doubtless be a maddening
smell of cheese and sausage.
A one-legged young man, his leg gone to the thigh, in a tattered
combination of military and civil coverings, stood always on that
corner selling his miserable shoe laces....
But there was another note, quite another, that rang lustily out from
the Kaerntner Street, for there the new feudal lords of Vienna, (which
inevitably has lords of some kind), walked with ringing tread in the
triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel
and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life
that once great, powerful "First Society."
As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost
entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert,
stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it
her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her
otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom
arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their
gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes,
Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy
even of those not of it. What the new Lords did and how they lived was
a mystery to Frau Stacher that she had no desire to solve. Her fear
increased. She felt but a bit of pallid wreckage in the flooding of
that active, highly-colored element. It beat against her suffocatingly,
frighteningly, that new blood flowing vehemently in Vienna's veins, its
only blood indeed. In the familiar street she was both stranger and
outcast daughter. She couldn't even look at the Bristol, whither so
many of those new lords seemed bent, there where people still crumbled
their bread at dinner instead of eating it.... It was Fanny's world.
Perhaps even now Fanny would be on her way there with her light,
straight, flying step, like a bird in the air. They all knew that walk
of Fanny's....
That first comfortable feeling of owning the pavement, of independence
had gone. She was increasingly confused by the myriad signs and symbols
of money of which she had none. Everywhere "Cambio-Valute," "Devisen"
in gilt letters, and banknotes laid out in patterns in the windows ...
exchange bureaux, in which unholy rites were performed by those chosen
men standing fatly, firmly on gold, while the rest of Vienna tottered
and fell on paper. She was exhausted too, by the buffeting of the
everlasting wind, and she suddenly and recklessly decided to take the
three hundred crowns remaining in her purse and get on the trolley.
There was one at the very corner that, mercifully, would take her up
the interminability of the Mariahilfer Street. After lunch the wind
would perhaps have fallen and she could walk back. She tried not to
think how far it would be. She was too spent for thought by her impact
with that new world, that world that suddenly had too much, trampling
to death the world that almost as suddenly had too little or nothing.
Outcast indeed.
The crowd was thickly waiting at the stopping place. In the rush
for seats as the trolley slowed down, she was pushed frighteningly
but fortunately along and up the high step and in a second found
herself sitting, breathless and hidden between a man with a large
sack of something that had, to the eager eyes of the other occupants,
the interesting appearance of flour, and a pale young woman with a
spindle-legged, big-eyed child of four or five in her arms. In her
sympathy with the young mother and the doomed child and her relief
at being seated Frau Stacher forgot her hunger and her fatigue and
delivered herself up to the delightful sensation of being borne
clangingly, powerfully along. She descended quite lightly at the
crowded stopping place, though she was jostled and jammed again by the
crowd fighting to get in. Crossing over she turned into a grey little
street and entering a sombre doorway went up to the apartment where
Anna was awaiting her husband and her aunt.
There was an air of expectancy about the room as Frau Stacher entered
that somewhat relieved its terrible dullness. On the table was a fresh,
fine linen cloth, from the days of comfort, and four places were set; a
bottle of pale Tokay, like a streak of sunlight caught the eye. There
was something sadly festive about it.
"I thought it was Pauli when I heard you outside in the hall," were
Anna's words as she opened the door. But her aunt accepted the
vicarious greeting without indeed noticing it. They all knew about
Anna. That was the way she was.
Her heavy dark hair that Tante Ilde had once so faithfully brushed
back into beauty was braided in a thick braid and twisted twice around
her head; but when you had said that about Anna, that was all there
was to be remarked. The rest was long, faded, shadowy. From those once
noticeably broad, fine shoulders, now simply gaunt, her thin breast
fell away into her flat waist above her bony hips. There was not one
single thing about Anna Birbach to cause anyone to suspect that she
belonged to a smiling, art-loving, easy-going, fatalistic race, with
something of the West and much of the East in its make-up. Indeed the
broad highway that leads east from the city is the straight road to the
Orient, is already the Orient. Something only vaguely diagnosable, but
highly-colored, slips in through that Eastern Gate to tint more deeply
the Viennese population, a happy enough mixture when only a tenth of
them, not nine-tenths, are starving. Hunger there has always been in
Vienna. Even in the days of plenty there were thousands who, palely
shadowing the street corners had nothing,--the bare, spectral want of
the East without its sun and leisure....
Hermine was in the kitchen. She had no more knack at cooking than
her mother, but the War had caught her in her earliest youth and the
Peace had taught her a few lessons of culinary survival,--though her
omelettes would always be hard and her pancakes tough.
The smell of the onions in the potato soup had its own peculiar charm,
however. Tante Ilde found that she was very hungry and she was quite
ashamed of certain uncontrollable, rolling sounds that proceeded from
the empty region beneath her belt.
Anna began immediately to tell her that they had finally decided on
a goulash,--it was safer and simpler to make than anything else.
Both Hermine and her mother had an uneasy knowledge that Pauli was
critical in regard to food, though he wouldn't say a word if a dish
hadn't turned out right; only he wouldn't be seen again for a couple
of months. Instinctively desiring to flatter him they had kept as far
as possible along Hungarian lines; the potato soup had been a second
choice, for Hermine's imagination had played at first opaquely about
a Halászle, a fish soup that he loved, but she had no fish and she
didn't know how to make it, so she slumped back on the potato soup as
offering least resistance. She was hoping for great things from the
Palatschinken, however, she had the batter prepared for cooking at the
physiological moment and the can of gluey apricot jam (ersatz) was
already open. Both women were obviously quite excited. Anna had those
dull, maroon spots on her cheeks; Hermine was paler than usual and kept
running into the kitchen and coming back and changing something on the
table. It was a quarter of an hour later when they heard the somewhat
rusty sound of the master's key in the door. He still kept that key
hanging on his chain, though for all the use he made of it the bell
would have sufficed. "The key of the cemetery" he called it to himself
and was thankful as he went in that he would find Tante Ilde there
among the graves.
He was a very handsome man of forty in a full-colored, ample way,
inclining slightly to embonpoint. His brown eyes were forever flashing
and going out as he lifted or let fall his pale, heavy lids. A rosy
shade lay upon his cheeks contrasting pleasantly with the clear olive
of his skin. A dark moustache did not conceal his white teeth when he
laughed, which was often, and they gave an additional accent to the
whole, the color scheme becoming even blinding when he wore, as on that
day, one of his favorite red neckties.
Immediately he filled the grey room, or perhaps it dissolved about
him.... Life, life. He brought the life of his pleasant, easy-going,
musical Viennese father; the life of his impetuous, fiery, musical
Hungarian mother, that strong, active element which the Magyars infuse
so happily into the more "gemuetlich" qualities of the Austrians.
Whenever anything happened in Vienna for good or evil in the old
days, it was generally traceable to the more dynamic qualities of the
Hungarians,--and doubtless will be so again.
There was no hint of war or post-war days on Pauli's face, rather some
astounding avoidance of their ills, some unimpaired eagerness for life.
His wife and daughter were unacquainted with a pale shadow that of late
often dimmed it.
The women, except Tante Ilde, were blotted out. She felt the
exhilaration, the immediate electrization of the air and sat up quite
straight, her elbows elegantly pressed against her waist and began
to smile her fine, sweet smile. Her presence lay about Pauli as a
wreathing mist about a mountain on a sunny day. Again he was thankful
to find her there.
Dutifully he gave Anna a robust but empty kiss on both cheeks, with a
"Well, how goes it?" and the same to Hermine, standing close by her
mother. He thought fleetingly for the thousandth time that it was a
calamity for women to be ugly.
Then he turned the full blaze of his countenance on Tante Ilde:
"Ach, the dear, lovely Auntie," he cried, "she must also have a
Busserl," and he proceeded to kiss each pale cheek and even to press
her against his thick, warm breast.
"Not lovely, only loving," she returned, but she smiled, suddenly quite
happy and Pauli felt his words had not been in vain. He liked to have
happy faces about him and laughter and jokes, and if it were women who
were being made happy all the better.
"I smell something good," he next said amiably sniffing in the air,
"and I'm quite ready. In the Cafés," he continued, "it's 3,000 crowns
for a piece of bread, 10,000 for a glass of beer and 5,000 for a smell
of roast pork from the next table!" Again he sniffed gayly. Even when
he barked his shins against a hard, low bench that stood unnaturally
near the dining table, he gave no sign of the impatience that always
possessed him when with Anna. But in spite of his remarks about his
hunger, he took very little of the lukewarm soup which Hermine had
poured out too soon. And when she dragged her sleeve in the goulash
as she put it on the table, he indulgently recounted a joke he had
seen in the _Meggendorfer Blätter_. How a certain woman going into a
cheesemonger's had skilfully passed her long sleeve through a dish of
white cheese, in that way removing an appreciable quantity, and how the
cheesemonger in a rage made her come back to pay for it, threatening to
have her up for theft.
Sallow Hermine was greatly in awe of her highly-colored father, who
expected from her, she uncomfortably felt, something that she could not
offer, but now she was giggling girlishly, and even Anna's face seemed
less formless.
Yes, Pauli was doing his best to make it pleasant for the quite
accidental beings who bore his name. Dispensing smiles that, after
all, were so rightly, though so strangely, theirs. Life was truly
mysterious; they were human beings too, come out of nothing, hurrying
as fast as Time could take them, to the same end. It produced
undeniably at moments a feeling of comradeship,--though Pauli intended
to avoid Anna in the other world....
Tante Ilde was indeed making things easier, suaver; Tante Ilde was
really an alabaster box of precious ointment, broken anew each time she
went into one of those homes not hers, diffusing sweet odors about her.
They would mostly, (perhaps not Pauli), have thought: "It's poor old
Tante Ilde and we've got to do something for her," not dreaming that
all the time it was she who was doing something priceless for them.